[OSM-talk] Portal for end users

[Daniel Koć]

W dniu 18.09.2015 9:10, joost schouppe napisał(a):
> I don't think a portal in the style of the Mapquest example is the
> best answer. I don't really think there is going to be any specific
> OSM-based Google Maps killer ever going to be built. Instead the
> strength of OSM is rather being able to cater to niches. No single
> Google Maps inspired project could ever reflect the diversity of what
> you can do with OSM.

I support this point of view. Google strength is integration of many 
services (including commercial ones) and a lot of automatic ways to 
gather and process data; ours is great amount of details and a lot of 
human-based ways to gather and process data. They are not contradictory 
- both ways can borrow something from the other, but I think starting 
with what we already have in a good shape is better than trying to start 
with imitating the other side of spectrum.

> Even though we have a diversity of news channels, I notice how many
> involved OSM afficionados don't know about some of these projects. And
> if they don't know, how is our average data user ever going to know.
> As OSM.org gets more features and users,  a larger proportion of those
> users will not know about projects like this.

Lack of integration - sometimes just underusing existing communication 
infrastructure - is the most visible problem for me in OSM. The 
ecosystem is broad, diverse and healthy, which is great, but very 
disconnected at the same time (even between the most important 
sub-projects), which makes trying to do anything crossing the boundaries 
very hard, inefficient and time-consuming.

> I understand that if we want to build a data-use portal, it should be
> managed separately from the current OSM.org infrastructure. But
> couldn't we make a subdomain like use.openstreetmap.org [9] to
> showcase projects? And maybe try and let that evolve into an ecosystem
> of applications, to make it as easy as possible to integrate features
> of one project to the next?

Nice idea!

-- 
"The train is always on time / The trick is to be ready to put your bags 
down" [A. Cohen]